Thanks-taking, 2020

I know barely anything about the people whose land I live on. I know barely anything about the treaties we all live in violation of. 

We have to go far out of our way to learn about indigenous history, culture, and resistance. 

A few years ago, when I lived in the Seward neighborhood right off of 94 in Minneapolis, I went on a walk to the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, which is right across the highway. A man was stationed near the freeway exit, hoping for generous drivers to stop. I started to walk past him (what within us urges us to keep walking, to avert our eyes, to escape?), but was drawn into conversation. He told me his name and that he was part of the Dakota tribe, an original people from the land upon which we were standing, the land that the massive freeway below us tore apart. 

Like probably the majority of white settlers, I had barely given passing thought to whose land I was occupying. I was born here! I’m Minnesotan. My limited ancestral memory fell short, denying me a truer understanding of land and belonging. 

At this point in the conversation, I was still feeling all the familiar, urgent, underlying messages that tell me to keep moving, to retreat back into my own world, to give nothing yet remain pleasant. But, was this my world? I started to look around. Things were different. I saw the buildings of downtown Minneapolis, something I had always taken for granted. I saw that these silver skyscrapers were new formations, that they rose out of the landscape abruptly, that they delivered a shock. I saw that the earth was hard to account for, from our perch on the bridge of this freeway, from the concrete underneath our feet. I saw that my home, just steps away, was another building built on land that wasn’t my own. At that moment, I felt profoundly unsettled in where I was. 

Photo by Steijn Leijzer on Unsplash

We looked at each other. “It’s strange, I feel like I should be the one to welcome you, to help you,” he told me. “There are so many newcomers on our land. And they have no memory for what has happened. You are a visitor.” Again, my body pitched off-kilter. I saw myself walking around this place, not as my individual self, but as a symbol. Not as a symbol: as a settler. Again, I felt unsettled, realizing that I didn’t understand the whole picture of who I was. From a different vantage point, I didn’t belong. From a different perspective, I was the ongoing manifestation of invasion and genocide. I looked away from it all. 

We white people are skilled at shaking things off and moving on. There’s an appointment, after all. Something to do. I left him at the highway exit, promising to return with some food. And even as I went through the motions of hurrying off so that my thoughts couldn’t catch up, I felt this ghostly need move inside of me, some heart-rending memory of belonging fluttering against my ribcage. I am starting to understand—slowly, slowly—that at some point in the far past, my people didn’t feel the need to take or extract. That there was some time in my ancestral history when there was a sense of home, when all the names and shapes of the land were known, spoken, and loved. 

But, we are a deeply fragmented people and that knowledge is buried; and so we push and push, past our emotions, to move forward, to take, to extract, to render silent. 

We live on land that was violently taken away from indigenous people. Is still being taken. 

There are no easy answers. We white people like to demand answers and actionable items, often from the people that we historically and currently oppress. 

But, we can accept being thrown off-balance because this unsettledness is wise and points us toward a clearer way of seeing the land and the people who live on it. We can live deep into that unsettledness, knowing that the land is not ours to take, learning about the ongoing indigenous resistance to the settler colonialism that has pried open the wounds of the earth and of many people; we can start to feel into our own wounded, home-seeking hearts, remembering that, at our best, we can be visitors living on stolen land, and at our worst, we can continue to be colonizers; we can come to understand, with a sense of clarity and responsibility, that we need to heal ourselves and that all our relationships—with the earth and each other—will remain extractive and broken until we do. 

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

Let Thanks-taking be our call to move into alignment, a call into solidarity. Let every other day of the year be the same. Let all the colonialist and racist statues be torn down and the racist names changed because symbols matter. They guide us to see ourselves and our world differently. Our children learn from them.

If like me, you live on the land of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people, let’s join in the local resistance to the Line 3 pipeline, the largest project in Enbridge’s history. More information is here: https://www.stopline3.org/issues